Sustainable Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Personal Development Journey: Global Leadership

Module I: INSPIRE

Leading sustainable transformation

In this course, different guest speakers will open your minds to the real sustainability challenges in this world. Prof. Jamie Anderson will teach you the basics on creativity and talk about how to take the lead to tackle these challenges in line with your own values and passions. Sustainability expert prof. Jan Beyne and his team will show you that sustainability is an imperative for any business. The real challenge is knowing how to transition from commitment to action, to successfully navigate the complexity of a sustainability transformation.

Technologies of Tomorrow & ethics

Technologies of tomorrow will give you a basic understanding of the key technological trends as part of a unique collaboration with IMEC ID lab – one of the best technology research centers in the world. Technologies such as Blockchain, Artificial intelligence, 5G, will be discussed and applied to your case while dealing also with the ethical questions around it. In addition, this course will also look into how you can protect your ideas and solutions.

Design Thinking

Part I: Identifying and researching problem spaces (3 ECTS)
Once you have spotted different interesting opportunities, you need to learn how to investigate and define the problem properly and find the right problem-solution fit. The design thinking methods will support you in this process.

Part II: Corporate Sustainability sprint (6 ECTS)
The Corporate Sustainability sprint is a three-week sprint to come up with innovative and sustainable business concepts for a corporate company. You will be able to apply your design thinking methods once more and collaborate in Milan with design students from Poli.Design (Politechnico di Milano).

Module II: ACT

Impact Strategies & Business Modeling

This course is structured to provide a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing start-up and corporate innovators. It makes nascent start-up and corporate innovators aware of the core strategic choices early in a venture’s lifetime that can have substantial impact on the venture’s future development and growth. Instead of reacting on and fighting against forces that innovators cannot control, participants will learn to take matters into their own hands by following a proactive choice-centered approach, instrumental for developing a superior entrepreneurial strategy.

Corporate Innovation & Consultancy

This course will train you to become an innovation leader in a corporate or an innovation consultant. It will focus
on the specific context of corporates and their challenges to innovate.

Financial Planning & Raising Capital

The finance course teaches you to make a strong and solid financial plan that determines the funding gap. It will open your eyes for funding possibilities and will support you in the process of raising capital for sustainable solutions.

Module III: GROW

Digital Marketing & storytelling

This course acknowledges all forms of marketing - be it offline (e.g. billboard advertising, newspaper ads) or online (e.g. keywords advertising, social commerce). Yet, the course sets a strong focus on digital marketing because (i) marketing channels are intertwined in Omni channel strategies, (ii) digital marketing is offering strong potential for growth and (iii) traditional channels are enhanced through digital technology (e.g. a personalized billboard ad). This course also gives you insights into how you create a strong story and make impact with a very limited marketing budget.

Global Scaling

Once a problem-solution fit is created, entrepreneurs might want to create impact on a larger scale. The scaling process is a challenging one. We cover the foundations of scaling and look into growth opportunities for long term impact. You will also travel to Berlin to dive into the inspiring sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. The goal of the trip is to identify growth opportunities, understand the circular ecosystem DNA and learn how to enter this landscape.

Master Project

You will be working on an in-company project (a venture building project) or on your own start-up for eight months. Whatever you choose, you will directly put theory into practice. Throughout these eight months you will be investigating and challenging the potential of business ideas by transforming them in real business cases, including market research, a product-market fit business model, a sound financial plan and ambitious go-to market strategy.

In Poli Design (Consorzio del Politecnico di Milano), the world’s best school in Design Thinking, you will spend a week learning techniques that will be immediately implemented in practice. During three weeks you will work full-time on a design-related exercise for an international company, the so-called “innovation sprint”.

In the past participants worked on innovation challenges of Air France, Unicef, Barco, Ecover, Samsonite and many others.

At the end of the program as part of the Global scaling course you will travel to Berlin to dive into the inspiring sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The goal of the trip is to identify growth opportunities, understand the circular ecosystem DNA and learn how to enter this landscape.

Besides your regular curriculum, you will also have the opportunity to enhance your studies with Electives. All Master’s programs offer 1 full week of Elective courses; one week dedicated to an intensive relevant topic challenging the status quo and pushing you outside your comfort zone. The idea is to offer topics outside of the core curriculum that are based around the current geopolitical climate, relevant world news and future insights. They focus on matters that will benefit your studies and provide enhanced learning opportunities.

To give you an idea, previous Elective topics have included:

→ Digital Transformation

→ Designing Business Models for Future Growth

→ Geopolitical Challenges

→ Emerging Asian Markets

→ International Healthcare Management

→ Organizing for the Digital Future

Your personal development is a core element in the journey you will undertake during your year at Antwerp Management School.

At AMS, we look beyond the mere transfer of technical knowledge. As our mission statement explicitly mentions, we also want to stimulate your personal development. With the Global Leadership track, we challenge and coach you to become more aware of who you are, how you cooperate with others, and what kind of career you want to pursue. We do this by building upon the three mission pillars of Antwerp Management School:

• Self Awareness: leads to stronger cooperation with others.
• Global Perspective: leads to a developed global mindset, allowing you to find better solutions to problems and complex issues.
• Societal Consciousness: leads to sustainability in essential economic processes, a fundamental value in business.

Throughout this journey, we will focus on these three levels of learning by working with a mixture of exercises, self-analysis instruments, moments of reflection, individual follow-up, collective sessions and peer coaching. We will offer you relevant frameworks to support you in understanding your strengths and needs, and defining your areas for growth.

Global Leadership development is more than a ‘nice to have’, it is a basic prerequisite for career success and recruiters will be assessing this when you apply for a job. Today’s employers are looking for an impressive set of soft skills when selecting young graduates. These include: self-awareness, the ability to work collaboratively with others, leadership skills, the capacity to adapt to new situations and to develop new skills, openness to and respect for different perspectives, multicultural awareness, and long-term and system thinking, to name just a few. This course aims to support you in developing these skills and in finding a match between who you are and what the world of employment needs; between your career ambitions and what employers are looking for.

After attending this program you will be able to:

→ identify and explain concepts and theories to transform business opportunities into viable and sustainable businesses.
→ apply different methods and frameworks (such as design thinking) to evaluate market and technology opportunities.
→ evaluate options to solve complex problems during different stages of the entrepreneurial process.
→ explore impactful growth opportunities in different international innovative ecosystems.
→ demonstrate professional pitching and communicating skills to sell innovative ideas to different stakeholders
→ effectively collaborate in teams and learn to bring different viewpoints together.
→ demonstrate entrepreneurial and leadership skills on various levels.
→ apply the learnings and frameworks to develop ideas achieving sustainability and social responsibility goals.
→ recognize and cope with the volatility of the entrepreneurial process.